At Home and Abroad . . . (1971)

The Home and Abroad Column from the September 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

At Home

 

The big question raised by the OZ trial is of course: what is pornography? What is it in society that depraves and corrupts to such an extent that those responsible need to be punished and shut away where they can do no more damage? Any adult who has ever been a child, remembering their own sexual fantasies and confusions, must wonder whether they would be corrupted by the kind stuff in OZ and the rest of the underground press. It might even be argued that such matter, by its very blatancy, is the very opposite of corruptive. But what about other forces in society whose pernicious influence is undeniable? We are not discussing here anything which even appears in any magazines, but the real, everyday experiences of life under capitalism. How else can we describe the men responsible for incidents like the My Lai, if not corrupted by the war? What effects does poverty and repression have on our lives, if not to deprave us? Is bad housing the kind of environment calculated to solidify or to destroy human relationships? What has happened to the ‘morals’ of a man who debases himself to the boss for the sake of a bit of promotion or a pettyfogging rise? Capitalist society is essentially depraved and it corrupts everything in it, including its people. No court with the wigged judge will ever try the system but it has been examined, found wanting and condemned. We should lose no more time in locking it away into the prison of unpleasant memories.

One of the great tragedies of capitalism is in the fact that, again and again, workers are misled into believing that they are doing something to end the system when in reality they are doing nothing of the kind. Faced with the reality, the incident usually becomes written into historical myth, which dies very hard. Such were the Spanish Civil War, the General Strike, the successive Labour Governments. The latest candidate in this dismal line is the so-called workers’ take over of the Upper Clyde. Part of the delusion here is that the shipyards collapsed as a result of a Government failure to subsidise them, when in fact they collapsed because they could not live up to the basic capitalist requirements of making a profit. Whoever runs them will be faced with that reality. And if the ‘take-over’ fails the workers will also face the greater bitterness stemming from the promise and the delusion. Yet we know from experience that failure will only strengthen the myth; It will be explained in terms of accident or treachery or the like. The ‘take-over’ of Upper Clyde is tailor-made for the fairy tale story books of the left wing.

 

Abroad

 

President Nixon, it is reported, is disappointing many of the people who backed him in 1968 for the presidency by his policy of negotiations with China. It is no new thing for a politician to win power on promises, both explicitly and implied, which he goes back on after he has won. Very often the promises are easily seen, at the time of making them, to be impermanent and impractical. In the nature of the thing, we are more accustomed to leaders of the left being involved in this sort of double cross, but there have been notable exceptions from the other side. In this country, there was Macmillan after Suez and with his policy on Africa. Abroad there was the classic case of de Gaulle, who so outraged the people who helped him to power that they tried several times to kill him. And now Nixon is upsetting his friends by fashioning his policy to meet the real demands of capitalism rather than political theories. There is some amusement to be had from observing the reaction of the disappointed supporters, who in each case thought about betrayal and turned for salvation to another leader. The left wing are of course well familiar with this tactic. Nixon’s angry followers are now thinking about supporting Ronald Reagan for president in 1972, as if he would be able to run American capitalism on assumptions other than those applied by Nixon—and as if he is any more consistent and had in any case not already been straightened by the President. The search by capitalism’s supporters for the honest, consistent leader who will never go against his word is never ending—until capitalism itself ends.

 

Politics

 

As the months go by the government of Edward Heath is increasingly shown up as equally bankrupt and impotent as its predecessors. As each successive blow falls — Ulster, Upper Clyde, Unemployment, Rising prices to name only a few — the Labour Party’s excitement heightens, with its hunger at approaching power. One report has it that constituency parties have been alerted to face a general election in the near future. This may be wishful thinking, a generous dose of which is essential to keep any capitalist party ticking over. What can be said now is that any general election will be presented to us in familiar, lying terms. The Labour Party will claim to be able to make capitalism work in our interests when they can’t. And we will be told that the issue of the election is something like the Common Market or law and order or nationalisation versus free enterprise when it fact it is, as always, capitalism or Socialism.

Unemployment in the 30s and the 80s (1982)

From the August 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every one of the political parties in this country (except the SPGB) claims that it has a policy which, if the government applied it. would reduce capitalism's unemployment to a very low level and keep it there. It was the late Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party, who wrote in 1959:

The great ideal of jobs for all first became a peacetime reality under the 1945 Labour government . . . The first objective of the Labour Government will be to restore full employment and preserve full employment. 

They had to wait five years, until October 1964, to see a Labour government in office again. At first it had some luck, in a small decline of unemployment in 1965. Emboldened by this. John (now Lord) Diamond, who was Chief Secretary to the Treasury, explained to the House of Commons on 1 March 1966 how this fall had been the result of government policy, and “that is how we propose to continue doing it". Then the government's luck ran out. Instead of unemployment remaining at 371,000, as instructed by Diamond, it jumped in 12 months to 631,000. and when the Labour government left office in June 1970 the Tories were able to show that unemployment was 200,000 higher when it took office.

But the Heath government which followed was equally unlucky. They, too, were pledged to “full employment" but saw the total rise from 582,000 in June 1970 to nearly a million in 1971 and 1972. Then came the Labour government of 1974-79, during which unemployment more than doubled, followed by the Thatcher government under which it has more than doubled again. All four governments from 1964 to the present time have been sailing on a rising tide of unemployment and there was nothing any of them could do about it except wait for it to subside in capitalism's own time.

However, though the governments cannot do anything about the amount of unemployment, the party politicians can indulge in an old game of challenging the official figures. This needs two teams, the opposition and the government, though anyone can join in. An accepted rule of the game is that the opposition, whether Tory or Labour, is on the attack, and the government, whether Tory or Labour, is on the defensive. Points are scored by the opposition when it can plausibly argue that the real number of unemployed is higher than the official figures; and by the government when it can counter the charge or claim that unemployment is really a blessing in disguise.

There was a splendid match in the winter of 1971. It was then that the official figure nearly reached a million and the Heath government had to meet the charge that the proper figure was higher. But how much higher? The Financial Times (11 December 1971) suggested that it was perhaps 1,250,000! The Observer (23 January 1972) quoted an estimate of 1,500,000. but in a later issue (23 February 1972) thought it might be 2,000,000. Not to be outdone Harold Wilson (Financial Times, 8 April 1972) put it at "nearly 3.000,000", and Peter Jay (The Times. 9 March) reckoned that it was "over 3 million”. An official estimate was that there might perhaps be 400,000 out of work who were not on the register, which would have given a total of 1,367,000.

Basically the official figures of unemployed on the register were, and are, disputed on the ground that a lot of unemployed workers do not trouble to register — including, in recent years, some redundant workers who do not seek work while they are spending their redundancy pay. The official figures are arrived at in the monthly count of the number of people available for, and genuinely seeking, work. The more extravagant estimates of a higher figure include guesses at the number of people, particularly married women, who are not seeking work but might perhaps do so if they could see that vacant jobs were available at sufficiently attractive rates of pay.

Faced with these embarrassing estimates of much higher unemployment the government at the time thought up some counter arguments to show that real unemployment was actually less that the official figures. They said that the large number of people they described as "unemployable” ought to be taken out, as should those registered unemployed who were only in the process of changing jobs, with a gap of a few weeks in between. And what about the people improperly included in the register who were secretly doing jobs on the side?

The most ingenious government defence came from John Eden, Minister for Industry, who said that the large number of unemployed on the register "reflect in part the redeployment that is under way"; meaning that it arose out of the government's policy of moving workers from contracting industries into expanding ones. "We can now look forward to what could be our greatest period of sustained growth in decades" (Financial Times 11 December 1971). The Thatcher government has had to fall back on the argument that the unemployed largely owe their condition to having pressed for too-high wages, and that it will take a long time for Tory policy to get things right.

In the politician's game about the unemployment figures points are scored by the opposition if they can claim that unemployment has reached a record level. For months on end. during the Labour government of 1974-79. the Tory opposition was able to do this, as unemployment climbed by over a million, from 629,000 to 1,636,000 in 1977. The form of the attack was that the figures were “a post-war record". Latterly, Labour Party politicians have been saying that the present figure of 3 million is “the highest ever recorded". The intention is to convey that unemployment now is greater than it was in the 1930s which it certainly is not.

The point is that the severity of unemployment has to take into account not only the number of unemployed but also the total number of workers to which it is related. For example, 2 million unemployed out of 10 million workers would be twice as severe as 2 million unemployed out of 20 million workers. Firstly, in 1932, the total number of wage and salary earners was perhaps about 19 million compared with the present 24 million. Secondly, fewer than 13 million of the 19 million were covered by the Unemployment Insurance Scheme and the official figure of unemployment in 1932 (over 2,900,000) took into account only those of the unemployed who were insured. If unemployment was as severe among the other 6 million workers as among the 13 million who were insured, the number of unemployed would have been shown as well over 4 million. Among the workers who were not insured were agricultural workers and non-manual workers generally.

Writing about unemployment in 1936, when it had fallen far below its peak of 1931-2, G.D.H.Cole dealt with the point:

There are, as we write, roughly 1.600.000 of them in Great Britain in the insured trades alone, there are really a good many more altogether; for there are also 110,000 uninsured workers on the register of the Employment Exchanges and an unknown number more who are neither insured nor registered. (The Condition of Britain, p. 219.)

Cole mentioned that at that time there were nearly 250,000 unemployed coal miners.

In 1932, when there were over 2.900,000 unemployed insured workers, on the register, it is the fact that 23 percent of the insured workers were out of work which gives a more accurate picture of the severity of unemployment generally, among both insured and uninsured workers. Unemployment was therefore very more severe in 1931-32 than it is in 1982. when it is 12.8 percent. The same is true of the United States where unemployment in 1933 was over 25 percent, compared with about 10 percent at present. Needless to say the “numbers” game was in full swing in the 1930s and with even more scope for guessing, since nobody knew how many of the millions of uninsured workers were out of a job.

As unemployment under the Labour government had risen from 1,164,000 (9.6 per cent) in June 1929 to 2.813.000 (21.9 percent) in August 1931 when they went out of office, they got a little satisfaction from seeing it go on rising under the National government which followed. Among the points made in the Labour Year Book 1932 was that a seeming 60,000 drop of unemployed among women late in 1931 was due to “changes in the conditions for the receipt of unemployment benefit, by which the claims of a large number of married women were disallowed”.

Of course the Thatcher government’s much-heralded recovery has not yet produced results, and unemployment might yet rise to the levels of the 1930s.

Edgar Hardcastle

The Freeze and After (1972)

From the December 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the myths of our age is that wages are sometimes restricted and sometimes not. Wages are always restricted; it is only the method that changes. Unless wage rates are kept down to levels which leave a margin of profit for the employer he intensifies the search for ways to reduce his total wages bill by getting more output from each worker; failing which he stops production and stands workers off.

The government always plays a part in this. It stands behind the employers, backing them up to deal with strikes and other manifestations of working-class discontent. But the government’s role is not always in the same form. It sometimes includes direct intervention through the imposition of controls on wages and prices. Generally this is when conditions favour the workers in pressing for wage increases. This happened in two world wars when unemployment had practically disappeared. By contrast, nobody talked about a prices and incomes policy between the wars when there were two million unemployed, markets were failing and bankruptcies soaring, prices were tumbling and workers were completely unable to prevent wages falling with them.

Promises, Promises

Since 1945 there have been half a dozen attempts by Labour and Tory governments to impose controls, starting with the “Wage Restraint” of the Attlee Labour Government imposed in September 1948. They have been variously named but all conform to the same general pattern. They were all excused as emergency measures called for by unforeseen circumstances, they were all claimed to be needed to prevent prices from rising and British exports being priced out of world markets with consequent increase of unemployment, and all were in contradiction with the election programmes of the Labour and Tory parties. Mr. Wilson rightly chided Heath with having abandoned his election pledges but seems to have forgotten that the freeze imposed by his own government in July 1966 came only four months after the Labour Party election programme had said “our purpose is not to dictate prices, wages and salaries”.

None of the post-war “freezes” completely prevented some increases of wages and prices. Nearly all were followed by a bigger rate of increase, with wages rising slightly more than prices. From the employers’ point of view the most successful freeze was the first, the Labour Government wage restraint from September 1948 to October 1950 which kept wage increases appreciably below the rise of the cost of living. As a method of preventing prices from rising the freezes, individually and collectively, have been a complete failure, for the rate of price increase in 1971 was higher than at any time since 1945.

Trying to Manage

In 1944 the Tory, Liberal and Labour parties all committed themselves to a three-point policy of stable prices, full employment and steady growth of production. Critics of government policy have often pointed out that at no time has a Labour or Tory government succeeded in getting all three together; it remained for Heath in 1972 to fall down on all three at the same time — a million unemployed, fast-rising prices and near-stagnant production.

The imposition of the present freeze was surrounded with loud recriminations between Heath and Wilson, all of it signifying nothing because this one does not differ from past Labour Government freezes except in minor details and reflects the same erroneous theories which are shared by the Labour and trade-union leaders with most of the Tory leaders. (The Times cynically commented that “it is their business to criticize each other”.) The Labour Party motion of dissent in the House of Commons on November 8 did not condemn capitalism and offer an alternative, but blamed the highest unemployment since the ‘thirties and a massive increase in the cost of living on “mismanagement of the economy” by the Tory government. The chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, Mr. Douglas Houghton MP, who in 1967 was boasting of the success of the Wilson government in making “modern capitalism work”, attacked the Tories this time not on the ground that they are running capitalism but on the ground that they are not “managing” it properly: they have, he said, “left capitalism unbridled”.

Guess the Answer

The completely erroneous theories held by the political and trade-union leaders since the three-party declaration in 1944 are that capitalism can be managed in a way to secure permanent full employment, with a more or less stable price level. On full employment, the TUC in 1970 declared:

“Maintenance of full employment is chiefly the responsibility of the government. All political parties, the Confederation of British Industry and the TUC accept that this should be the case. There is agreement that the necessary techniques are available to sustain full employment . . . “ (TUC pamphlet, Automation and Technical Change)

On stable prices, Mr. Wilson in 1957 wrote:

“Ever since the Coalition Government’s White Paper all major parties have been committed on Keynesian lines to using the Budget as a means of avoiding undue inflation or deflation.” (Labour Party pamphlet, Remedies for Inflation)

At the beginning none of them said anything about wage and price freezes, but already in 1957 Mr. Wilson was saying that: “For a Labour government no less than for the Conservatives, success or failure in the battle against inflation would depend on its ability to secure an understanding with the unions which would make wage restraint possible”. For the unions it was either you agree “voluntarily” to restraint or you have it imposed.

Act of Iniquity

Much of the conflict between the Labour Party and the unions on the one side and the Heath government on the other about the failure of the consultations which preceded the present freeze concerned the question of the Industrial Relations Act. The Labour-trade union side argued that if the Government would suspend the Act it would make agreement easier.

It is to the point here to recall the case made against the Act in 1970 by Vic Feather, General Secretary of the TUC. It was not that the Act would depress wages but that it would encourage competitive wage claims between workers and push wages up too much. “This Bill would create a wage drift of a kind the country could not afford, either now or at any time in the future.” (Report of a trade union conference, Sunday Times, 13 December 1970).

What has happened is that the policy held by all of them has proved quite fallacious and they do not know what to do next. What the TUC described as “the necessary techniques … to sustain full employment” meant in practice “pumping more money into the economy”, which they imagined would lead to expanded production and full employment but which is a sure specific for putting up prices. As the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Barber, has complained, he wants to pump more money in the belief that production will then expand but at the same time wants to “curb the money supply” to stop prices going up.

Marx was right. Capitalism goes through its phases of expansion with low unemployment on one hand, depression with heavier unemployment on the other, in spite of government financial and budgetary policies. The only remedy is to replace capitalism with Socialism.

Dreadful Prospect

In the meantime, fearful of the explosion that could occur if inflation is carried on extremes, the view has been gathering support among economists and business men that the government should stop inflation whatever the consequences. The Tory politicians on the other hand recoil from this because one consequence could be that they lose the next election. So they put their trust in the hope that British capitalism now, after several false starts, is on the way to recovery from the depression.

They have another fear. There is one Tory politician who never accepted the Keynesian nonsense and who wants to go back to the old-style policy of letting capitalism take its course, with the unions “free” to make which wage claims they choose and businesses “free” to go bankrupt if they can’t survive. Some commentators have begun to speculate on the possibility that if Heath’s hopes of industrial recovery are not speedily fulfilled, Enoch Powell will get the leadership of the Tory Party.

Edgar Hardcastle

Tories Again Steal Labour’s Clothes (1971)

From the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1957 the Labour Party Conference adopted a new pensions policy to which they gave the grandiose title of “National Superannuation”. Under their proposals, said their policy statement.

“there would be two elements in the State pension, a flat-rate element and a graded element. Every insured worker, including those in approved private schemes, would be entitled to receive the flat-rate element, as they do now, whereas only those covered by National Superannuation would receive the new graded element. Thus everyone in the country, when they reach the approved age, would draw (1) a flat-rate pension and (2) a graded pension, due to him either from an occupational scheme or from National Superannuation.”

Employers were to contribute more towards the cost of National Superannuation than the workers and some of the money was to be invested in stocks and shares.

At that time, neither pensions nor contributions were related to earnings (or “graded”): everybody paid the same National Insurance stamp and got the same pension, while those who had no income apart from this pittance had to resort to National Assistance.

Labour had hoped that this vague but superficially attractive promise of “Half Pay on Retirement” (as Richard Crossman once unwisely put it) would win them the next election. Imagine their dismay when the Tories announced in the election year of 1959 that they were to introduce earnings-related pensions themselves. This State Graduated Pension Scheme was denounced by the Labour Party, with some justice, as the “Tory swindle”. It is still going and pays a man the princely pension of 2½p a week for every £7.50 he pays in! Even the Tories recognise that it has been an utter failure and now propose to abolish it (and swindle its victims even more by not protecting them against inflation).

Elected to power in 1964, Labour set to work on their National Superannuation Scheme. They didn’t exactly give this matter any priority as it was not until 1969 that the details—to apply from April 1972—were announced. Even then, what emerged was somewhat different from the original 1957 policy. Instead of two State pensions, one flat-rate and one earnings-related, there was to be only one earnings-related State pension; employers and workers were to pay the same; the money was not to be invested in stocks and shares; and only the lowest paid were to get half-pay on retirement (a big deal that would have been, seeing they could hardly live on full pay).

Grossman’s National Superannuation and Social Insurance Bill was still going through Parliament in June last year when the Labour government was kicked out. The Tories had criticised the Bill as too complicated, but had promised their own reform of pensions. Their alternative plan was published in September in the White Paper Strategy for Pensions. What is interesting about these proposals is their amazing similarity to Labour’s 1957 plan. The passage quoted earlier could well have been Sir Keith Joseph explaining the new Tory proposals.

The Tories propose a basic flat-rate pension from the State (like the present below-the-poverty-line £6 a week) which everybody will get and an earnings-related pension either from a private scheme or from the “State Reserve Scheme”. It is this Reserve Scheme that bears the resemblance to Labour’s original National Superannuation. For not only will employers pay more towards it than workers but its funds will be invested in stocks and shares. When Labour had proposed this in 1957 it was greeted by howls of “back-door nationalisation” by the Tories. Now, apparently, they have changed their minds and done what not even Crossman dared to do.

The Tory plan also involves another measure which might have been expected to come from a Labour government: there will be earnings-related contributions for the basic flat-rate pension. In other words, the higher paid will pay more than the lower paid but will only get the same pension.

Labour would have claimed that this was part of some plan to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. It is nothing of the sort since the fortunes of the wealthy are to be left untouched. It is really only redistributing income from the not-so-poor to the poor, a redistribution of poverty amongst the working class. Labour’s bill would have had a similar effect and this in fact is all most social reforms can amount to under capitalism.

That the Tories can introduce reforms originally proposed by Labour is a further proof that the two parties are basically the same. They are both committed to capitalism and are both trying to solve its problems without upsetting the profit motive. So it is hardly surprising that they both come up with similar reforms.

The present need to reform State pensions is the result of the failure of the previous Labour/Tory pensions policy. Nearly thirty years ago now, they were both agreed on another plan to “abolish want in old age” —the Beveridge Report. The recommendations of this Report were embodied in the National Insurance Scheme set up in 1948 and still extant. Today this Scheme provides on retirement a miserable pittance which, even the government’s own White Paper admits, is about £2 below the poverty line so that one in three pensioners are forced to apply for means-tested National Assistance or “supplementary benefit” as it is now cynically called.

Anyway, earnings-related pensions are only supposed to abolish—some time next century, according to the government’s own figures — destitution in old age. Poverty, in the sense of being deprived of control over the means of production and its products, is the normal condition of the class of wage and salary earners, during their working lives just as much as during retirement. It is only because they are poor that workers need doles to protect them from destitution in old age.

We doubt, however, if the new reforms will ensure that no old worker falls below the poverty line, especially since the Tory proposals, like Labour’s Bill, envisage the continuation of the modern Poor Law known as the Supplementary Benefits Commission. Poverty, and in some cases destitution, in old age will be the lot of the working class as long as capitalism lasts no matter how many social reforms are made.

Adam Buick

At Home and Abroad . . . (1972)

The Home and Abroad Column from the October 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Review September 72

At Home

There are signs that the government is preparing to retreat from its previous entrenched position on wages. If this happens it will need careful handling as far as publicity goes, which may explain the heavy caution with which the recent talks between the unions, employers and the government were treated. When they came into power Heath’s government were quite positive that they had the solution to the economic problems which have plagued British capitalism since the war. The unions, they said, must be brought to heel; in future they would be met head on in any industrial dispute. There would also be a special Act which would in effect weaken the unions’ bargaining powers. At the same time prices would, in some mysterious way which has eluded all other governments, be held in control. The promised result of this would be a steady rise in prosperity for everyone. In fact what the Tories were concerned about, as any capitalist government would be, was basically wages and the level of capital investment in British industry, which were affecting the competitive power of British goods on the world market. Every government since the war has come in with promises to tackle these problems and they have all had apparently simple solutions. Every one has had "new” ideas and policies; Wilson’s government, for example, had the Prices and Incomes Board and the Declaration of Intent from the employers and the unions. Who remembers them now? Every government, faced with the day to day realities of capitalism, has been compelled to change its line and to abandon the programme it put forward at the election, while the problem continued as bad as ever. Heath’s had the brief period of open conflict, as he promised and he has the Industrial Relations Act. Some workers have been gaoled, a union has had a massive fine. But British capitalism could not have carried on for long like that; it makes more sense, economically and politically, for the Tories to change their policy. To repeal the Industrial Relations Act would be too obvious a signal of defeat but there will probably be other signs in the near future of the government’s surrender to the intractability of capitalism’s chaos.

Abroad

Since it has never happened before, the killing of the Israeli Olympic athletes helped foster the idea that we are living in times of special cruelty and disarray, and that guerrilla tactics are something of an innovation. It needs only a little effort to recall many examples of similar tactics, sometimes by small bands of killers and sometimes by larger, more organised groups. If the Arabs showed great courage in their raid, it was not the first time that bravery has been used to murderous ends. Capitalist states are always organising the courage of their peoples in a massive effort of destruction. At such times they use any weapon they can, including that of the ultimatum. The famous demand for unconditional surrender in the last war was no more than a threat to murder and destroy on a savage scale, if the other side did not give way — and it was a threat which the Allies carried out. The men who plan and implement such ultimata are not called terrorists and murderers but there is nothing to choose between them and the men who did the killing at Munich, or indeed those Israeli nationalists who waged so ruthless a guerrilla campaign against British occupation in the years after the war. Capitalism is a mass of conflict, springing from the competing economic interests of many rival groups both national and international. In one way or another, force is always applied in these conflicts and capitalism continually conditions its people to accept the use of force, often of a terrifying scale and intensity. The Arabs at Munich acted as they have been conditioned to. The outcome of violence is never pleasant, whether it is eleven dead bodies at Munich or a hundred thousand at Hiroshima. But if the working class are not clear on the issue, if their ideas on it are confused by the illogicalities and the violence of nationalism, they can have no hope of ending a victory of which bloodshed is so integral a part.

Politics

When the Monday Club meet to protest against the Ugandan Asians, they thunder that the immigrants are being allowed in against the wishes of the people of this country. When Wedgewood Bonn talks about British capitalism’s entry of the Common Market, he whines that the voice of the people should be heard on the issue, in a referendum. We do not need to be too perceptive to realise that concern for a democratic society emerges only when policies are being pushed through which the speaker opposes. Tory M.P. Soref supports a government which, like the one of which Benn was a member, has imposed plenty of measures without asking what the majority of people thought or wanted. Democracy is a word for capitalist politicians to play with and to use if they see advantage in doing so. In fact capitalism cannot be a democratic society; it cannot take its people into its confidence, cannot make all its information freely available, cannot run itself as the majority wants, cannot involve everyone in the decision taking from top to bottom. Soref is no more interested in making available full information about race, about housing, population, social services and so on than Benn is in telling us everything about the economy of capitalism. Democracy needs knowledge and when the working class have that there will be no more capitalism with its irrelevant issues and politicians to exploit them.

Death of a politician (1990)

From the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Have you recovered yet from the death of Ian Gow? How devastated were you by the assassination of that implacable, unquestioning, indiscriminate supporter of capitalism as administered by Thatcherite Tories? In one respect Gow's death was unremarkable: we were told how clever, brave, considerate, reliable he was (readers can add their own laudatory adjectives from the vocabulary they will have amassed from the tributes paid to other dead politicians). Apparently, political life is teaming with such estimable people and we should grieve deeply when they die. The only problem is why, if we are governed by such capable leaders, is the world in such a mess? Are we worse off, when one of them dies, than we were when they were alive?

Ian Gow was the son of an eminent doctor. He went to public school and did his National Service as an officer in one of those regiments which liked to pretend they still rode into battle on horses. He qualified as—and always looked like—a solicitor before turning his attention to politics. After contesting a couple of constituencies where the Labour majority made his a hopeless cause (in one, at Coventry East, the voters were so impressed with Gow’s qualities that they gave his Labour opponent—Richard Crossman—a doubled majority) he was handed the plum seat of Eastbourne. In 1945 the Labour Party, fielding a personable ex-officer against the remote and disdainful Tory incumbent had come within shouting distance of winning there. But the colonels and landladies of that seaside town quickly got their political bearings back and by the last general election they were presenting Gow with a majority of almost 17,000 while the Labour candidate could scrape up less than 5,000 votes.

Selsdon man

In parliament Gow soon put down his markers, joining the Selsdon Group which opposed Ted Heath’s drift away from the policies agreed by the conference of Conservative bigwigs at the Selsdon Park Hotel in the run-up to the 1970 election. Selsdon foresaw a Tory government declining to intervene in disputes between employers and workers, or in the case of an unprofitable company, or to use official influence on wages and prices; state interference in such affairs had led to the dire condition of British capitalism in the 1960s: henceforth they would all be left to be sorted out by the pressures of the market. The Labour Party delightedly likened these ideas to the emergence of a primitive being—Selsdon Man.

Heath put Selsdon Man out of his misery. attempting to resolve the crisis which hit his government by his famous U-turns on Rolls Royce and Upper Clyde Shipbuilders and some other issues. The Selsdon Group—Nicholas Ridley was another member—campaigned against this abandonment of what it saw as the policies essential for the salvation of British capitalism: the free market, privatisation, education vouchers, private health services and big cuts in taxation and public spending. It might have occurred to the Selsdon Group that theories about state intervention had developed because private enterprise left to itself had failed to control capitalism but people like Nicholas Ridley have never been susceptible to arguments based on fact.

Gow's membership of the Group could not have harmed his reputation with Thatcher, who when she came to power in 1979 made him her Parliamentary Private Secretary, which was a polite name for her whipper-in and nark. In that job he was a meticulous note-taker at any meeting of potentially rebellious Tones and infuriated his colleague Jim Prior by openly stimulating opposition to Prior's Bill to set up an Assembly in Northern Ireland to start "rolling devolution" there. Prior called it a “disgraceful episode" but to Gow it was all in the day's unsavoury work; he was. in any case, a hard-line unionist.

He also irritated a lot of Tories by his sickening admiration of Thatcher, at one time saying that she had no great need to admit that she was ever wrong because she was almost always right. At times he was too much for even the Thatcherites to bear; one complained that, while he was preparing himself to contribute to the usual grovelling ovation at the end of one of the prime minister's speeches. Gow was "blubbering" before she had even begun.

Thatcherite Christian

If Gow had any ability beyond this kind of work it was not glowingly evident during his time as Minister of Housing (for which he was qualified by his ownership of a large and lovely 16th century house in the Sussex countryside) and then as Minister of State at the Treasury. When he resigned over the Anglo-Irish Agreement he could spend more time on church affairs, for he was as dogged a Christian as he was a Thatcherite.

It comes as no surprise that Gow should complain about the Church being too political (which meant critical of the Thatcher government and voicing concern about issues like deep poverty and homelessness) and not sufficiently Christian (which meant blindly supportive of Thatcher and careless of any human suffering). Although he was a Christian he clearly had reservations on that stuff about us all being god's children equally loved by our maker, for he opposed sanctions against South Africa and voted against legislation designed to relieve sex discrimination. He demanded an unquestioning acceptance of the killing of the three IRA members by the SAS in Gibraltar—a predictable attitude from a man who operated on the simple principle that "our" side was always right and "their" side always wrong. His physical concept of Jesus is unknown but he did not like men with beards since he suspected them of being what he called socialists.

At all events Gow was doing very well. A partner in a successful firm of solicitors, a member of Lloyds and of several costly and exclusive London clubs, with a liking for mixing and drinking exotic cocktails, he would have had reservations about the meek inheriting the earth. There is indeed little progress towards that illusionary object under the Thatcher government, which is perhaps why Gow supported it so ardently.

This is not the place for any detailed account of what this government has done: it can be summarised by saying that it has taken advantage of the present world economic conditions to inflict such damage on the trade unions as will take them a long time to recover from. It has ferociously attacked working class living standards and in particular those on the lower levels of poverty, who have been treated most savagely. It has seen the dreams of many of its bedrock supporters—small business people and those with a mortgage on their home—turn into nightmares which they can't wake up from. And while it persistently assures us that this suffering is necessary so that things can become better in the long run, and better permanently, the fact is that the problems persist. The rate of bankruptcies and insolvencies is increasing; price rises are accelerating and the CBI has recently stated that British capitalism is on the brink of another recession. This is the chaos which Ian Gow stood for so blindly.

To criticise the victim of an assassination, to take a hard look at how they thought, spoke and acted, is not to condone their murder. Political assassination is a futile business, which removes one twister to make room for another; the only effective way to deal with society’s problems is through democratic political action aimed at getting rid of capitalism and its twisting politicians. This is a social system which brutalises its people, under which life is cheap and millions die every year through wars or unnecessary diseases and “accidents". Being assassinated means that politicians who glorify in this inhumane way of running human affairs can go to their graves on a wave of outrage against their killers instead of against capitalism.

Ivan

The Five Jailed Dockers (1972)

From the September 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The dockers are worried about their jobs, or rather about the drop in standard of living they will suffer if they lose them. Since 1967 the number of dockers has fallen by a third, from 60,000 to 40,000, mainly as a result of the so-called container revolution. One aspect of this problem has been that much container work, even in dock areas, has been done by workers other than dockers, some non-union, some members of other unions, but all generally at lower wages.

It is the policy of the dockers’ unions, the Transport and General Workers Union and the rival National Amalgamated Stevedores and Dockers (expelled from the TUC in 1959 for “poaching” TGWU members), that the work should be done by dockers, at dockers’ wages. To this end, the dockers have taken various forms of industrial action, official and unofficial, legal and illegal, from blacking container firms to a national docks strike.

A number of the blacked container firms took the TGWU and some of the shop stewards (from both unions) to the National Industrial Relations Court complaining that the blacking was an “unfair industrial practice”. The Court agreed : the TGWU was fined at least £55,000 and, eventually, five dockers sent to prison for “contempt of Court”.

The reaction to the jailings shows that working-class, or at least trade-union, solidarity still exists. Besides other dockers, thousands of newspaper workers, miners, train drivers and others (including those at the blacked Midland Cold Storage depot) stopped work. Such was the pressure that even the TUC would have called a one-day general strike of all its ten million members if the five dockers hadn’t been released, an unprecedentedly during move from the Knights of Congress House. And of course they were released, obviously as a result of this working-class resistance. The government itself may not have directly influenced the Courts, but the workers on strike did. The House of Lords and NIRC were left with no alternative but to hurriedly concoct some legal excuse for letting the men out.

This was a successful defensive action by the working class and one which the Socialist Party of Great Britain welcomes just as we would have supported the one-day TUC general strike. Not of course that we share the romantic illusions of those who thought that such a strike might have been the beginning of “the revolution”, but because experience has shown that, on occasions such as this was, a general strike can be a useful weapon to defend the interests of the working class within capitalism. The Industrial Relations Act was designed to make working-class industrial action in defence of wages and working conditions less effective, so it is in the interest of the working class to try to make the Act itself ineffective.

This said, there is one reservation we must make, from a Socialist and working-class point of view, about the dockers’ activities. Their struggle had a sectional aspect in that they were pushing their interests as one section of the working class not just against employers but against another section of the working class. For their demand that container work should be done by dockers is a demand that it should not be done by those now doing it. This at least was how it was seen by the workers at Midland Cold Storage, all members of the TUC-affiliated Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (USDAW). In a leaflet dated 10 July and issued to lorry drivers they declared:

“We are entitled to defend jobs that are ours. The dockers want our jobs and with your help are prepared to close down our firm. Why? The work we do is no different to that done in the many Cold Stores throughout the country.. We are not blacklegs — we are ordinary working men and we want our jobs. Dockers who picket our Depot have no greater claim to work available in a community. If they have, is your job really safe?”

It is because we as Socialists stand for the interests of the working class as a whole that we cannot take sides in such inter-union or inter-worker disputes and cannot endorse the dockers’ campaign.

Their action in picketing places such as Midland Cold Storage, though understandable (as is the reaction of the USDAW members employed there), illustrates one of the limitations of trade unionism. Trade unions, as the very word suggests, represent not the working class but just sections of it, their members, and in pursuit of the legitimate aim of protecting their members’ standard of living often emphasise, and exaggerate, the sectional divisions within the working class. This the Socialist Party does not support.

Needless to say, the concern expressed for the other workers by their employers and Mr. Heath was so much hypocrisy. The former were concerned rather with not having to pay dockers’ wage rates and Mr. Heath with saving his anti-working class Industrial Relations Act. Some of the older dockers may also have seen as hypocritical too the support expressed by the Labour Party for the five jailed men. They may have recalled the occasion in 1951 when a Labour Attorney General, acting on the instructions of a Labour cabinet which included Mr. Wilson, prosecuted some dockers for breaking an anti-strike order, also unsuccessfully as it turned out.

So, while the solidarity strikes to get the dockers released demonstrated the usefulness of trade unionism for the working class, the pickets and counter-pickets at the docks demonstrated the opposite: its tendency to divide the working class by sections rather than to unite them as a class. Working class unity, which is indispensable if capitalism is to be ended and replaced by Socialism, is a task for a political, not the industrial, organisation of the working class. To this end the Socialist Party of Great Britain exists and we appeal to all workers to join our struggle so that the system which forces them to engage in these degrading squabbles for jobs can be quickly abolished.

Ted’s all at sea but does it matter ? (1971)

From the October 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard 

If we accept their own evaluation of themselves, there can be no doubt that our politicians do a wonderful job. Toiling night and day, they control the economy to a hair’s breadth accuracy — stimulating here, damping there, so that we all enjoy the most marvellous prosperity ever known to man. And if anything goes wrong with their control, if they stimulate when they should dampen, or vice versa, they are ready with a number of amazingly generous schemes of social security which ensure that even when we are out of work we are almost as prosperous as before.

Then there is the matter of defence. We all know that we live in an extremely dangerous world where everything we hold dear, like our motor car and our back garden and the Royal Family, is under the threat from Russia and China and Egypt and many other uncivilised countries. To ward off this threat the politicians have arranged a fantastic armoury of weapons which are enough to frighten away the most insensitive Oriental ever born. Of course at the same time as they claim the credit for the production of these weapons the politicians also tell us that they have attended numerous conferences and signed numerous treaties with the professed object of ensuring that the weapons are never used, But that apparent contradiction should prove to everyone except the most cynical what wonderful men our leaders are.

With all these tremendously good, and time consuming, works being done for us the wonder is that the politicians ever have any time spare for anything else. Yet many of them are active in all sorts of other fields. Churchill, for example, used to spend a great deal of time eating and drinking; Attlee was clever enough to be able to doodle silently while the great affairs of state were being fought out all around him; Macmillan and Douglas-Home were both fond of the grouse moors. But now we have a Prime Minister who is better than all of them because he is an international sportsman.

It is possible that some sport fans will he misled by that description into thinking that Ted Heath has been recruited into Alf Ramsay’s squad and will shortly be taking on George Best for the glory and honour of Old England. But before any of them have a heart attack at this idea, it should be made clear that Heath’s international sporting is confined to yachting, in which he has represented Great Britain.

Perhaps Heath’s public relations men think that his hobby — if that is what it can be called — fits in well with his image of the small seaside town grammar school boy who made the top. This, you see, is the age of the Daily Mirror dinghy, when almost any worker who is not actually out of work can probably afford to buy or build his own sailing ship for a fairly modest outlay. Unfortunately Heath’s rather elephantine publicists seem to have overlooked the vital fact that his boat is larger and more expensive — something like £20,000 more expensive — than all those little do-it-yourself boats.

In addition the Prime Minister is providing the Labour opposition with some handy ammunition, because as he has been absorbedly sailing backwards and forwards there has been an escalation of the current problems of British capitalism which he as the top politician should be able to solve. In Ulster the violence flares even higher, with more and more deaths. The world is in the throes of yet another currency crisis. At home, among the usual poverty problems like housing, unemployment has become an issue and is likely to reach the dreaded million mark this winter.

The Labour Party have always been adept at picturing leisured Tory ministers callously at their sports while the workers are suffering. On the face of it, it seems reasonable to expect, politicians to be energetic and committed to their work. But it needs only a little probing beneath the surface to put this assumption in a very different light.

Of the men who have held the job of Prime Minister since the First World War, one who provoked a lot of criticism by his apparent inertia and lack of concern was Stanley Baldwin. He was a man who was always ready to make a sentimental speech about the beauty of the English countryside but who preferred to spend his holidays in Southern France. He exploited the image of the comfortable, fatherly, pipe-smoking leader talking to the people like a family doctor — which he rather spoiled by being photographed looking affectionately at a pig. Chamberlain referred sarcastically to his ‘‘poetic temperament” and whatever truth there was in this sneer, Baldwin was capable of coining some memorable phrases — like his slogan of ‘‘Safety First” for the election of 1929, when there were a couple of million unemployed in this country who might have been expected to want anything but a policy of caution. Nevertheless the workers were so fascinated by Baldwin’s promise of tranquility that they gave him almost enough votes to get back into power.

Just after he got back to the Premiership in 1932 he

. . . declared himself by no means overwhelmed by his responsibilities ... He was going to the theatre tonight!

(Neville Chamberlain’s diaries; 23.5.1932).

And while Baldwin was so gay and carefree Sir John Orr was telling the world, which included the politicians, that the cost of an adequate diet — nine or ten shillings a week — was beyond the purchasing power of one third of the people. A little before this Baldwin had announced to the Junior Imperial League that “This is a glorious age in which we live . . . the whole world is sick” but he did not mean the same thing.

After a time his lethargy and stone-walling became a liability. In addition he once made the statement that “You cannot palter with the truth for the sake of votes”, which must have seriously unnerved his fellow' politicians and, more than anything else, convinced them that he had to go.

Baldwin was succeeded by the scrawny Neville Chamberlain, who may have been the most unpopular Prime Minister of recent times. So old fashioned was he that he regarded the fountain pen as a new fangled instrument of torture. Chamberlain belied his appearance because, apart from recurrent gout, he was a robust and physically tireless man. He took the chair of every Cabinet committee dealing with major domestic policies; he was the one minister in his government who could always be relied on to read and digest every paper before the Cabinet; when he was seventy and would tire out his police bodyguard by dragging him on long, hard hikes over the Chiltern Hills. And of course there were those famous flights to meet Hitler — in those days quite an adventure for a man of 69.

Although Chamberlain championed many of the methods of running British capitalism which might have been put forward by the Labour Party — for example state welfare schemes and what he called a “managed economy” — he was the image of the stiff, grim faced Tory. Yet none of his opponents could accuse him of lethargy; indeed, when he later became damned with the memory of Munich the Tories must have wished miserably that he had not been so energetic. Perhaps a bit more of Baldwin’s casualness would have saved something from the wreck which emerged as Labour’s victory of 1945.

But in the nature of capitalism’s politics the Tories recovered and after Attlee’s men, many of whom were so energetic in their efforts to defend the interests of the British capitalist class that they worked themselves into an early grave, came the Age of the Grouse Moor. As it happened Macmillan was a one-time admirer of Baldwin’s and shared many of his characteristics as a slick performer on the political tightrope. He too made slushy speeches, once persuading a deputation of railwaymen to call off a strike by tearful reminiscences of the 1917 battle of Passchendaele.

Macmillan was a man who presented strongly contrasting images. He liked to affect the “effortless superiority” of one who had gone to a posh Oxford college yet he could also sponsor policies like the Premium Bonds which some Tories thought were vulgar. One of the many surprises he sprung was to become energised by taking on the job of Prime Minister. Before that he was thought to be worn out by his time as Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer. But as Premier he blossomed; crisis suited his acting talent and he quickly dominated his party, stifling any gestures of opposition with elaborate yawns and deliberately boring speeches.

Nevertheless, behind the facade of the dandy in a fashionable play Macmillan was doing a tricky political job. He played a large part in recognising the necessity of, and organising, the retreat of British capitalism from the old Empire so dear to Tory hearts. He signalled this policy in a speech which passed a new catch phrase — the Wind of Change — into common usage and which infuriated those Tories whom Macmillan had allowed to believe that he would carry on with Eden’s policies in areas like the Middle East. Years later, in an interview with Nigel Lawson (Listener 8/9/66), he described the process of this trickery:

Lawson: Would you say it is easier for a Prime Minister in this country to do one thing if he says he is doing something else?

Macmillan: It is a very common method, yes.

As in the case of Baldwin, Macmillan’s popularity waned and his grip on his party weakened, with the growing impression that he pursued too casual a style while crisis mounted all around him. In the end he panicked, he came to admit in the Profumo debate that he was out of touch with the times and, after one last effort, he retired from the Premiership. Even his influence on the choice of his successor Douglas- Home provoked such a split in the Tories that they never used that method again.

After Douglas-Home, Wilson came roaring into office with a reputation for crushingly hard work. He was another grammar school boy made good — in fact the original, authentic article with his simple life style and comfortable family. Wilson was said never to relax, giving up even his Sundays to reading and to preparing his speeches. He said he thrived on work; only boredom made him tired and the most responsibility he had the more relaxed he became.

For a time this was effective; we all remember how pleased the voters were with their new, bustling Prime Minister after those thirteen years of Tory snobbishness and lethargy. It was only as reality forced its way into the picture (yet again, for the umpteenth time) that Wilson was discredited. He himself probably helped in this process, by persisting with the image long after it had been exposed as a sham and the man of action written down as a slick purveyor of empty clap-trap and blatant trickery. It will need a massive confidence trick now to reestablish him as a creditable politician worth any of the millions of votes which will be cast for capitalism at the next election.

It would be possible to go on like this for some time, but every example would lead us back to the same conclusion. The personalities of our politicians — whether they are stupid or clever, energetic or lazy — have absolutely no effect upon the world they are supposed to control and improve. The tragedy is that, as political leaders are necessary to capitalism, the working class assume that they will always be necessary in any society. In fact, a successful politician needs many of the talents and qualities of a good actor, which means that he cannot represent reality. It is not uncommon, when a play is no good, for the customers to enforce its shut-down by the simple method of not supporting it. In the same way the working class could bring down the curtain on the destructive farce of capitalism.

Ivan

Low Life in High Places: The Political Scandals (1973)

From the August 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our politicians have recently been looking rather like a man who has found the first flakes of dry rot in his house and who knows that as he crumbles away each piece of dead wood he will reveal more and more damage. The uncovering of scandalous goings on in high places has caused some excited voices to ask whether capitalism is being undermined by its own rottenness. Journalistic fashion, which at other times can be preoccupied with war, or crime, or economic crises, now luxuriates in stories of secret cameras and microphones and boardroom deals.

Watergate, of course, is the hottest piece of scandal, with its insight into the muscle tactics of American politics. Over here we have no Watergate, only Lambton and Jellicoe who show how capitalism’s rulers do not always keep to the standards of conduct they like to lay down for the rest of us. The Poulson case has revealed something of how firms can win contracts and influence people. The News of the World’s tireless muckraking has helped in turning up the BBC payola case, which promises to let us in on the well-known secret that although we may pay our money we do not necessarily take our choice. (America also has a payola scandal, but to the relief of its participants it is crowded off the front pages by Watergate.) Lonrho will go down in the history of British boardrooms as an example of how to succeed in business without really trying.

A big tax evasion scandal is about to break in France, which may involve a couple of hundred companies in accusations of fraudulent operations. In Germany there are rumblings that the hero of the left, Chancellor Brandt, held on to his office last year only by bribing a deputy to change his vote in Brandt’s favour.

We Never Closed

Now the surprising thing about all of this is that it is so surprising. Scandals are exposed only intermittently but the evidence is that they are happening all the time; there is always some group or individual who is trying to steal a march on the rest of the ruling class by bending the rules.

As anyone who has heard of Mayor Daley knows, American politics are almost synonymous with corruption. It was never established whether Kennedy did get his microscopic majority over Nixon in 1960 by virtue of a bit of vote-fixing in Illinois. At any rate, the Kennedys were probably too smart to allow themselves to be connected with any such dealings. Kennedy’s successor Johnson came into power on a cloud of suspicion over his connection with Bobby Baker, whose career included manipulated government contracts, questionable bank deals, diversion of party funds and the employment of the services of call-girls as a gainful investment. Johnson denied any suggestions that he was involved and while his one time protégé floundered in miserable exposures the great wheel-and- dealer president lived to fight and win another day.

How is it with the Empire ?

Rumour has it that things are more gentlemanly in England; or is it that British workers suffer from a different strain of gullibility? Remember, for example, Horatio Bottomley, who swindled his way into and out of several fortunes before he overstepped even the bounds of working class hero-worship. Bottomley’s first swindle was pulled off in the 1890’s but during the 1914/18 war the workers queued in their thousands to join up after hearing one of his famous recruiting speeches. He carried on during the war, while the men he had recruited died in the trenches, and afterwards, rooking rich and poor until it all caught up with him and he went to prison in 1922. Bottomley’s fall was not quite the distressful event it might have been for his admirers, because he had already been through the courts many times. Indeed, it was his success in these cases which made his enemies wary of challenging him; he once tried to bribe someone into taking out a hopeless action against him, to reinforce his reputation for legal invincibility.

Perhaps Bottomley picked up some tips from that other great popular man of the people, Edward VII, who resembled him in many ways — gross, vulgar, audacious and with enough sensual fixations to satisfy the most fervent Freudian analyst. Edward, especially while he was Prince of Wales, gambled, ran up debts, ate massively and indulged a copious and wide ranging sexual appetite, which landed him in scandals in which his only protection was his eminence. On at least one occasion he was the subject of a successful blackmail. None of this prevented him, when he became king in 1902, assuming the leadership of a church which instructs workers that of all sins the deadliest is sexual deviance. It even gave him a mild popularity with some of the workers who suffered deprivation in such bitter contrast to Edward’s vulgar opulence; they thought well of him for his racehorses, for what they called his sportsmanship and — more incredible than all — for his common touch.

Spies and Ribaldry

Under the memory of Edward VII Lambton and Jellicoe are small fry. It was perhaps their misfortune that their exposure, coming just ten years after the Profumo affair, should revive that episode. Profumo, the War Minister who became involved with an expensive prostitute called Christine Keeler, committed his indiscretions at an especially unfavourable time. When Edward VII was stamping the brothels British capitalism was powerful, secure. In 1963 it was a different story and much of Prime Minister Macmillan’s time was taken up with trying to persuade his followers to accept the reality of the decline of British power. It was a popular fantasy, to which the Labour Party was as attached as were the Tories, that British capitalism had secrets which powerful rivals like Russia were itching to steal. That was partly why the Foreign Office spy Vassall got as much as 18 years for allowing himself to be blackmailed into passing information and why soon after there was such a wave of hysteria over Profumo who was said to be, among other things, a security risk.

What memorable summer days they were, with ministers each week awaiting with dread the latest instalment of Christine Keeler’s story, the endless jokes and with the Daily Mirror, feeding the notion that the scandal reached to the peaks of society, suggesting that Prince Philip was involved by the simple ruse of publishing an outraged denial. Somewhere there had to be a halt and in the end the British ruling class took their revenge upon Stephen Ward, the toady who had introduced Profumo to Keeler. Ward was abandoned, then destroyed, by his influential friends — an ending with its own tragic but typical irony.

Privilege

That dirty episode was representative of a social system which cannot come clean. Capitalism has rules which are moulded by the privileged interests of the property-owning minority. It is a society in which there can be no general harmony of interests, in which agreements are signified by the knife in the back, the foot on the neck. Within the privileged minority there are other minorities continually forming, attempting to seize extra privileges and to bend the rules in their own favour. To some extent these are accepted and contained by the rest of the ruling class; it is when they overstep the limits of prudence and become a threat to capitalism’s public face that they have to be dealt with.

Watergate, unsavoury as it is, is no worse than the everyday usage of capitalist politics, which could not continue without a succession of consciously formulated deceptions upon the working class. During the presidential election last year the American workers were aware of a lot of what was involved in the Watergate scandal, yet they gave Nixon an historical vote of confidence — because he promised them, if anything, a more controlled and repressive capitalism and wrapped it all up in the familiar smooth avowals of the used-car salesman.

The Lambton affair has demonstrated little beyond the fact that the privileges of the ruling class extend into all aspects of human life. Lambton himself (Daily Telegraph 21 June 1973) justified it in a predictably audacious way:

. . . men with great ambitions also had a strong sexual urge that was not satisfied easily.

If such men were limited and ordered to be irreproachable, there was a danger of the creation of the power élite. This would undermine the the fundamental purpose of democracy.

And he rubbed in his advantage, when the scandal broke, by holing up in an expensive hideaway. Workers who are caught in similar tangles have no such relief available to them; they have to sort out their personal and emotional difficulties at the same time as they cope with the drudgery of housework, of the office or the relentless production line.

Smoothing it Over

Heath tried to salvage something from the Lonrho affair, which showed up another aspect of privilege, by making his instantly famous remark about the "unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism.” There are no reports of him choking on the words. The shareholders displayed their feelings by packing the company’s special general meeting and enthusiastically supporting the management policies, big handouts, tax avoidance and all, simply because they had produced big dividends. That is the normal face of capitalism, much more logical than Heath’s pathetic attempt to humbug his way out of the matter. The Tory leader, like any other politician, can accept any face of capitalism without a thought for the savagery of its exploitation. Beside that, there are no grounds for objecting to some company directors fiddling a few hundred thousand on the side.

In one way Heath was pointing to a danger in the present situation. The working class are continually allowing themselves to be diverted from attending to the essential matter of abolishing capitalism and replacing it with Socialism. They are diverted by the notion that capitalism would he more acceptable, were it organized by one bunch of tricksters rather than the other. They are diverted by the glamour of a princess marrying a man who is rich partly through a family interest in selling sub-standard food for working-class consumption. They are diverted by the idea that capitalism need not be run as a cut-throat, scandalous business, by this sort of assurance:

It was the Government’s prime concern to see that capitalism worked fairly and effectively because it was on that that our prosperity was established. (Geoffrey Howe, Minister for Trade, replying to questions in the Commons about Lonrho; Daily Telegraph 12 June 1973.)

It is instructive to observe how the ruling class as a whole unite in fostering these deceptions. Brezhnev’s visit last month to America signified another stage in the resolve of the Russian and American ruling classes to divide the spoils of world capitalism as peaceably as they can. Not so long ago, in the depths of the Cold War, the Russians could have been relied upon to make the most of something like Watergate. Yet there was Brezhnev, helping Nixon to divert attention from Watergate and look like the weighty statesman so beloved by all workers — and doing it with a deliberate measure of publicity-catching clowning. Seeing those two robbers at the White House, beaming and waving, who would have believed what they are both capable of, both responsible for?

The world working class should match this with a unity of their own. As the scandals put capitalism’s leaders under pressure, they respond in a familiar way. Nixon adopts the mask of a betrayed innocent, Heath of outraged decency. They are papering over the rot, trying to delay the awful moment when the leprous reality can no longer be hidden.

Ivan

At Home and Abroad . . . (1971)

The Home and Abroad Column from the August 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

At Home

The latest, and most famous, example of a politician’s vote catching phrase rebounding back onto him is Edward Heath’s “at a stroke’’ promise to deal with rising prices at the last election. Of course nobody in their right mind took this seriously and the record on prices since the Tories took over proves the point. The Tories made a lot of noise about the promised effects of a reduction in SET and those who are mistakenly under the impression that such things determine prices may have believed it. Perhaps they have learnt better, now that SET has been cut in half and prices continue to climb. The Labour Party, as if they had never broken an election pledge in their life, overflow with false rage about Heath’s promise. Perhaps this rage acts as a sort of tranquiliser, stopping them from looking back at the record of their own government on prices. And finally the Tories, playing the honourable game of politics, keep passing the buck back; for example the confessed economic ignoramus Douglas-Home blaming the Wilson government for setting a “time bomb” of price rises which is now exploding under Heath’s men. This is all very well for the exponents of meaningless political shadow boxing but the working class, who send these people to Westminster, should realise how empty it all is. And if they don’t realise, a look at the shop price tickets should remind them.

One person who can be excused this exercise is Prince Edward, the queen’s youngest child. All workers who may have been worried about what would happen to the prince’s education when his private tutor left him to get married had their minds set at rest by the announcement that he would be going to Gibb’s preparatory school in Kensington where they charge £100 a term to teach the kids, among other things, “respect for property.” This may in fact be something of a waste of time; since these kids come from the class who own all the property, do they need to be taught to respect it? Wouldn’t that be more in line for working class kids who don’t have any property? Coincident with the prince being booked for Gibb’s school the memoirs of Lord Butler were published. He, we may remember, is the man who managed the Education Act of 1944 through Parliament. That was said to be a very daring Act, because it gave everyone equal rights to the best education.

Abroad

President Nixon said that his journey to China had been fixed because of his desire for peace, now and for generations to come. In view of this uncontrollable desire for peace, one wonders why the delay—and when did it come to Nixon, that he might get peace in talking with the Chinese government rather than in rattling nuclear weapons at them? At all events the visit will have the effect of upstaging the “peace” movement in America and it seems the Democrats will have to make some hard running now to have a chance against Nixon next year. It would be fascinating to sit in on the discussions between Nixon and the Chinese: one established, powerful capitalist state at last bargaining with another, new and rising and threatening. What betrayals, what carve-ups, what sharing of the spoils there will be! When the truth about it is known it may well turn out to have been one of the dirtiest episodes in the history of capitalist diplomacy.

One immediate effect of Nixon’s visit may be to end the present struggle in Vietnam, which otherwise threatens to go on for ever. A similar situation may be developing in Northern Ireland, where killings have now become almost accepted as the normal routine. How long ago was it, that the “progressives” in this country were demanding that the British government send in the troops so that the troubles could be ended with typical British fair play? In the event, as was clear all along, the troops have simply become the target of the opposing factions. We might hope that the “progressives” would recognise the struggle has roots deeper than they ever dreamed of, did we not know that fundamental thinking is foreign to their minds.

Politics

Has Wilson at last come down off the fence over the Common Market? In truth, he has never actually been on the fence, since even a master trickster like Wilson cannot entirely erase the fact that his government themselves tried to join the Six. What Wilson has done is to recognise the electoral possibilities of the Common Market issue and, like any good politician, to exploit them. The most popular pictures of the Common Market at present consists of rapidly rising prices in essential foodstuffs while hordes of foreign workers come freshly into England. Anyone with any experience of working class attitudes knows that that is not a vote-winning concept; the government will have to do some intensive propaganda if they are to convince the voters otherwise. Meanwhile, Wilson craftily has the best of both worlds. He still hangs on to his party’s policy of going into Europe but charges the Tories with accepting humiliating terms which would damage working class conditions and worsen international relations with the Eastern bloc. All of this, thrown in with some typical Wilson stuff about the Tories’ cynicism and privilege, may turn out to be a winning formula. If it is, we can depend on it that the doubting and opposing voices in the Labour ranks will be stilled, for they—just like the cynical Tories—will forgive a leader anything provided he brings home the electoral bacon. The fact is that there is nothing to choose between Labour and Tory on the Common Market, or on cynicism.

Greasy Pole: The Death and Life of Selsdon Man (2000)

The Greasy Pole column from the May 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was early in 1970 and Harold Wilson’s government, which less than four years before had been returned with an emphatically increased majority, was sinking deeper and deeper into unpopularity. The Conservative opposition’s leader, Edward Heath, was very different from his predecessors Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home, with their image of long days slaughtering on the grouse moors. In keeping with this, the Tories went out to persuade the voters that they were a party of radical change. Some months were devoted to labouring over policy reviews and draft manifestos and in February 1970 the leaders met at the Selsdon Park Hotel to draw it all together into a programme designed to win them the next election.

The discussions at Selsdon were driven by Heath’s desire to get into Number Ten with a more or less clean sheet, as a leader who was reacting against the past. This meant against the confused and erratic blundering of Wilson’s government, which the prime minister liked to describe as pragmatism but which others might call a triumph of opportunism over principle. In fact, in electoral terms there was something to be said for the “clean sheet” because there had been several examples of stunning victories after the promise to be a purgative change from a dismal, discredited past. This was the case when Labour won in 1945 and again in 1964 and since then it has happened with Thatcher in 1979 and Blair in 1997.

Thatcherism

The decisions taken at Selsdon Park were centred on a concern about tax cuts, a more vigorous programme of law enforcement (both of them voter-attractive) and a more selective access to social services and state benefits (which have become more popular in recent times). “After the 1964 and 1966 defeats,” wrote Margaret Thatcher in her memoirs The Downing Street Years (apparently forgetting that a few other people were also involved), “I joined with Ted Heath in a rethinking of party policy which seemed to foreshadow much of what we later came to call Thatcherism”. Selsdon was treated to an overdose of media interest, partly because of a panicky response when an unprepared Heath was required to face a band of reporters on the Saturday and was advised that it would be most useful to emphasise a tougher policy on law and order. It was thus no surprise when a strident communiqué came out of the conference, promising the electorate an invigorating dose of market-driven economic liberalism as an alternative to Labour’s hopeless blunders.

Heath began to talk about a “new style of government” which would abolish the policies of wage restraint which previous governments (including Conservative) had seen as so essential to the prosperity of British capitalism. “We have always been opposed to compulsory wage control,” he informed us soon after Selsdon, “We opposed it in the House when the Bill was going through, and we are opposed to it and we will not introduce it”. At the same time, there would be no more government investment to rescue failing companies; “lame duck” firms would have to “stand on their own two feet” or expire. The market, left to itself without any interference from the government, would operate to ensure that only the strong and useful—the profitable—would survive, which would be to the benefit of everyone.

Primitive

The first reactions to Selsdon were that it was a boon to the Labour Party and a terrible mistake by the Tories. Wilson made the most of it; he was then at the top of his form as a political con-artist and came up with the name of Selsdon Man for those responsible for spawning such primitive, brutish ideas, as against Labour’s model as a party standing for a modern, civilised, caring society. Selsdon Man, a political cave-dweller, was assumed to have lost the next election for the Tories.

In fact there is some reason to think that Wilson got it wrong, that Selsdon was not so much out of tune with the times. In his biography of Iain Macleod, Robert Shepherd states that the discussions were not as fervent as most people imagined; it was more a matter of sorting out policies which would distinguish them from the Labour Party. Heath described the event as “quite unspectacular” and grumbled about the “fuss” in the press: “I can think of no major new departure which emerged”. Robert Blake, the historian of the Conservative Party, thought that Selsdon did the party more good than harm and John Ramsden, in his history of the party—An Appetite For Power—considered that, in contrast to Labour’s obvious disarray, a co-ordinated policy which looked as if it might endure would be a vote winner.

And so it turned out, as Heath won the election in June 1970 and the voters waited to see whether he would live up to the brave declaration in his preface to the Tory manifesto: “Nothing has done Britain more harm in the world than the endless backing and filling which we have seen in recent years. Once a policy has been established, the prime minister and his colleagues should have the courage to stick with it.”

U-turns

The voters did not have long to wait. In July that year the news came that Rolls Royce was in deep trouble, largely through losing massive amounts of money over the design and production of an aero-engine for Lockheed. This, clearly, was a “lame duck” company which should be left to die because it could not “stand on its own two feet”. But instead of having “the courage to stick with” their declared policy and allowing Rolls Royce to go under the Cabinet, after trying to persuade some banks to put up the necessary money, unanimously decided that the state would have to step in with a virtual nationalisation of the firm. “Ministers had been forced to consider,” Heath excused himself afterwards, “whether we should allow our political reservations about state aid to outweigh considerations of the unemployment effects which would result if we let such a great concern go to the wall.” He did not say so, but the effects on votes was also on their minds. Pragmatism, in other words, ruled OK.

It ruled again, a couple of years later, when the affairs of the long-ailing Upper Clyde Shipbuilders reached crisis point. A 1969 memorandum written by the mad marketeer Nicholas Ridley had advocated a complete government withdrawal from UCS but this kind of ideological approach was, even after Selsdon, in reality unacceptable. Pragmatism—a concern for the effects on employment and therefore on votes—demanded that, first, the Yarrow yard should be separated from UCS, with a sweetener in the form of a large government loan. Then, in February 1972, during a debate on unemployment, the decision was announced to bail out this latest “lame duck” with state aid.

By that time the Selsdon policy of non-intervention in wage bargaining had also gone by the board. In April 1971 Heath was “encouraged” when the secretary of the TUC, Vic Feather, offered to negotiate over an incomes policy, wrongly described as not only “voluntary” but also “new”. If Heath had stuck by the Selsdon policies he would not have been encouraged, but outraged, by Feather’s offer. By the autumn of 1972 we were back with an attempted government freeze on wage rises, through various stages of severity, policed by something called the Wages Board.

Rover

So Selsdon Man did not live long after the election which he had so generously helped the Tories to win. There are still attempts to bring him back to life; the wretched Trade Minister Stephen Byers was once an ardent advocate of the beneficial effectiveness of the market but—like those before him who were confronted with a similar problem—he had to stop his attempts at resuscitation when he met the crisis at Rover cars. Selsdon Man may have seemed to be before his time but he did achieve one thing—to expose how ready are politicians to abandon the plans which, they have solemnly assured us, are the one sure way of dealing with capitalism’s problems.

Ivan.